Monday, 24 July 2017

[REVIEW] The Tomb of the Sea Kings

[REVIEW] The Tomb of
the Sea Kings

by Lawson “Blood Master” Bennett with Jimm Johnson

Published by The Scribes of Sparn

The Tomb of the Sea Kings

When the idea of self-published
adventures started to get traction with the OGL, homemade PDFs, OSRIC, POD, and
a lot of things which make our lives easier, this is how I imagined our bright
future would be like. People with low budgets and big ideas putting out dodgy
little booklets with questionable but lovingly made artwork and a heaping of
sense of wonder. The true DIY spirit would recognise no boundaries, and
creativity would triumph over commerce and production values. And a little bit
of that happened, and some of it didn’t, and ten years later we are in a crazy
world where Guy Fullerton’s Hoard
and Horde list contains 1,530 entries, RPGNow’s OSR section contains 1,614,
but you actually have to look carefully to find a supplement that fulfils that
original promise and does it well. This is one of those supplements.

Tomb of the Sea Kings looks
exactly like the weird little booklets you want to find at a convention
or used book store, and it reads like a love letter to funhouse tournament
modules like White Plume Mountain and Ghost Tower of Inverness. It
wears its love for old school gaming on its sleeves. It is unapologetically homemade
and strange. Nobody would ever run with this kind of art in a professional
outfit, and no serious author would write a scenario where you get to fight stone
skeleton archers in a room filled with lotus flowers whose pollen will turn you
to stone in 4 rounds. Those serious people are wrong and Lawson “Blood Master”
Bennett and Jimm Johnson are right.

Tomb of the Sea Kings is
just about the right size for an adventure module with a total of 48 keyed
areas – it has enough meat on it to last, but it doesn’t try to take over your
campaign. I wish more modules were this size, and not those eternally
disappointing anemic affairs which litter RPGNow and the general internet. It
is presented as a tournament scenario, and it almost certainly won’t fit into
an ongoing campaign (except perhaps a rather odd one), but it’d be a rather
good one-off for an experienced group of players or at a convention. Like many
TSR modules, it gets a lot less serious as you leave the straight initial
premise and get deeper into it.

The two-level dungeon in Sea
Kings is all about the strange ideas you have when you release your inner thirteen-years-old
killer DM, but you are old and experienced enough to make those ideas work. Tomb
of the Sea Kings has not much rhyme or reason (the eponymous Sea Kings are
featured in only two or three encounters), but it has a lot of puzzles and
puzzle-like things which are textbook Gygaxian D&D. It is good adversarial
GMing, where you will routinely run into “screw you” situations if you try to
play what’s on your character sheet, but you’ll have a good chance of pulling it
off if you have the right combination of inquisitiveness, caution, and a penchant
for thinking on your feet. It feels very unfair (particularly towards thieves),
but if you look at it closely, following game logic and coming up with
improvised solutions will mostly save you, or at least give you a fighting
chance.

This Is Art

The encounters in the dungeon are
silly and fantastic, and instead of thematic coherence, have a
stream-of-consciousness associative feel to them. You have the Blood Freezer
followed by the Vampire Room followed by the 3D Goggle Room followed by the
Rotoscope Dragon Room (one of my favourites), then the Spriggan Room and the
Anti-Vamp Room. There are gleefully evil
rub-your-hands-while-cackling-maniacally traps, great setpiece puzzles, and
about the right amount of combat with powerful enemies. You can die right in
the first room, and you have to choose your battles to avoid getting worn down
by the time you get close to the ultimate prize. The rooms are often
illustrated with lovingly rendered scribbles which completely capture the
module’s idiosyncratic style, and are quite helpful for the GM in rounding out
the sparse but effective room descriptions. There is a pull-out sheet in the
middle of the booklet with the dungeon maps and a helpful stat roster that’s a
very good, utilitarian touch.

Now the module isn’t flawless. It
is excessively linear (although with lots of red herrings along the way),
probably as part of its tournament heritage. Some of the rooms are one-note, “here
is a vampire”, “here is a room where there might be 1-2 Anti-Clerics”, a bit
disappointing in comparison with the inspired craziness elsewhere. When you can
come up with the “Anti-Cleric Hourglass Room” or the three-room Gold-Silver-Copper
puzzle, it is easy for the reviewer to start having high expectations. While
the monster stat blocks are generally helpful, they follow this annoying
tendency of not assigning spells to the module’s generous range of spellcasting
opponents; and you also have references to random, letter-coded treasure types.
As much as campaigns vary, modules should at least give a general idea in these
cases, and we will customise them to our hearts’ content if they don’t fit.

All in all, this module does what
it sets out to do, and it is exactly the kind of thing I would like to see more
of. It has a personal style, it doesn’t let decorum and publishing standards
get in the way of having fun, and the DIY is with it. It is worth owning in
print – the Lulu booklet is pretty damn nice, and it is an example of “trade
dress porn” that feels just right.

No playtesters were credited in
the adventure (but it was apparently run at multiple conventions with great
success).